Ignite

Ignite is an AI-powered dating app designed to combat the rising loneliness epidemic by helping people start meaningful conversations. We don't automate relationships. We help people begin them.

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Inspiration

Our team wanted to make a mobile app, so we figured that a dating app would be perfect for a Valentine's Day themed hackathon. It allowed us to be creative with the UI/UX design and expand our skillsets.

What it does

Ignite is a fully-fledged dating app with profiles, authentication, live chatting and swiping. In addition to the standard dating app features, it also includes an AI to help start conversations. The AI can read your chat and give you suggestions on how to keep the conversation going, or even where to go on a date.

Intended Goal

The purpose of an AI chatbot in a dating app is not to replace conversation. Our goal is to have it only as a tool to make conversations flow smoother.

How we built it

The app is built using React Native, Expo and Typescript. Firebase was used for authentication and database services. We also used the UI Library Gluestack.

Challenges we ran into

This was the first time either of us had used React Native, so it was a challenge learning a new framework and integrating it into Firebase. The most difficult feature to add was the swiping mechanism, it required UI animations as well as more complex database logic. Also, shoutout to Apple's .heic file extension for never wanting to work anywhere.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We essentially built a functional dating app in only a few days, with no experience in React Native.

What we learned

Planning is very crucial, especially prioritizing which features need to be built first. Some features required us to focus and work together, and for others we could split the work and accelerate our progress.

What's next for Ignite

Next, we plan to add some more guard rails to the AI features (such as only allowing you to generate AI ideas after sending a few messages yourself) as well as some basic dating app functionality we couldn't get to (searching by distance).

We'd also love to deploy our app on AWS using services like Amplify and get it running in the app store/google play store. To monetize our app in the future, we'll add the ability to pay to see which users like you, and to use more advanced AI features.

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